Tom Rawlinson

Music Technology BSc (Hons)

A graduate with a passion for music,technology and bringing the two together.

Currently working in the custom masking/protection industry - looking to pursue a career using and further developing the practical skills, theoretical knowledge and other soft skills gained from my degree and work experience since

Achieved a 1st Class honours degree in Music Technology from Staffordshire University which included a year spent as an intern at Modern World Studios. During my degree I focused on studio recording using Pro-tools HD and investigating Stereo Microphone techniques for my final year project and dissertation.

My aim is to pursue a career using and further developing the practical skills, theoretical knowledge and related soft skills gained from my first class honours degree in Music Technology BSc and my working experience since.

I am currently working for Greentree in the custom masking and protection industry, providing operational and sales support to the company directors, managing the integration of an acquired business and implementing a new accounting and CRM software package. I manage special projects for a number of high profile customers as well as assisting colleagues with the investigation and implementation of new products and services to increase our relevance in the market place.

Experience

May
2008 - Present

Sales and Operations Support Manager / Greentree (Verton Ltd T/A)

I currently work alongside the managing directors, liaising with customers and suppliers and have undertaken large scale projects such as implementing and maintaining the companies VOIP phone system and moving to Sage 200. I managed the redesign and release of a new 52 page catalogue and helped to prepare for and run the stand for the Surface World Exhibition at the NEC. Prior to this I worked each summer between terms at university initially in a data entry role, performing a variety of tasks including processing sales orders, purchase orders and invoices into Sage. I have also worked in the warehouse fulfilling customer orders, performing stock takes and operating the CAD/CAM machines.

Sept
2009 -
May
2010

Intern / Modern World Studios

As part of my music technology degree I worked as an unpaid intern at the studio. This involved; assisting with microphone placement, equipment setup, running the desk and pro-tools, equipment maintenance, studio cleaning, answering the phones, painting parts of the studio, and generally looking after clients needs.

Aug
2007 -
Aug
2007

Research Assistant / ELSPA

I created a database to store articles relating to the games industry in the media. I then researched these articles and input them into the system I built.

Apr
2006 -
Apr
2007

Customer Assistant / Tesco PLC

I worked on checkouts for a year serving customers, helping to answer their queries and providing a friendly service.

As of last Monday my dissertation is over, my final interview seemed to go well and I think the project was well received. I'll know the results around Mid June, and once they've been confirmed I will upload a copy of my dissertation in case anybody is interested in my experiments and conclusions.

The final recordings I created of the Stafford Performing Arts Centre ensembles have now been uploaded to soundcloud so feel free to have a listen, any feedback appreciated.

I've bought some fancy lightscribe CD-Rs so I can burn fairly professional looking CDs for my finish product. This is my initial idea, it may change before the 3rd May depending if I have time to play around with it any more before then.Comments welcome

So there are 22 days left until hand-in, a quick update on my progress.All of my tracks have now been mastered (using K-20 as a reference point, leaving plenty of dynamic range), normalised to make use of all of the available bits when transferred to the 16 bit CD and noise reduction applied to clean up anything left in there from the noisy pre-amps.

The report itself is going well, I have a rough 1st draft pretty much finished. Once I get feedback from my tutor I suspect there will be plenty of redrafting as well as neatening up all the rough edges that are still present- references missing, diagrams that need scanning, audio samples embedded etc. To get it all done in time I will be spending most days in the library, which has been pretty conducive to a good work ethos so far.

Hopefully I will be finished well before the deadline of the 3rd leaving me time to print and bind well in advance of the queues but no matter what happens, It will be handed in by that date then all I will have left is 1 exam, GradEx and my dissertation presentation and that is it for my university education. Scary, and exciting.

So last night I completed the second of my final stereo recordings, this time a local string quartet- 2 Violins, Viola and Cello.

AKG C451b's in an ORTF array

Everything with this session ran a lot smoother this time round, having learnt from last weeks mistakes and allowed half an hour to setup before the performers arrived. Also managed to get the second Digidesign 96 interface working this time, so was able to spot mic each of the instruments. I selected AKG C414s for the spot mics due to their high sensitivity, low noise and wide frequency response however due to a shortage of microphones I ended up using an sE4400 for the Cello, basically sE's copy of the 414. Interestingly I hadn't realised that they came as a stereo pair, if I had then perhaps I would have used them for the Blumlein array as the frequency responses of a matched pair should be almost identical.

The recording itself went very well, once again I was impressed by the quality of the performers and the recordings themselves sound impressive for each technique, with noticeable differences between them which will make for interesting comparisons. All that remains to do now is to edit the tracks and apply limited amounts of EQ and reverb to bring the quality of the recordings up to a commercial standard before I conduct my listening tests and write up the results, my discussion, conclusion and recommendations.

Been very busy since my last post, I will write up in more depth at some point but so far I've conducted one or two more tests in a slightly larger studio which illustrate the stereo effects much more clearly which is good.

Spaced Omni Pair, ORTF and Mid Side Techniques

Last night I completed the first of my final recordings with a local clarinet quartet who were fantastic. I had a few technical problems with only one of the Pro-Tools interfaces seeming to work, so I wasn't able to have spot mics as well as my stereo arrays but the recordings from the arrays sound great. The C414s were clear and quiet while there was a bit of noise from the C451b's. I have, once again, fallen in love with the Blumlein technique, it gives a really clear image which is balanced and tonally pleasing :-)

I will be completing one more recording, with a string quartet, next Wednesday before I conduct listening tests with a small group of people to find out which techniques people prefer on playback.

Since my last entry I have been into the studio to conduct some more experiments.The first using CLIO, an electrical and acoustic measurement system, I played pink noise from a speaker at a number of different stereo arrays and measured the dBSPL from each microphone in the array for two different locations of the speaker- directly in front and 2 meters off to the side. By comparing the difference between levels for the pair of microphones the ability of each technique to localise sound based on level differences could be assessed.

The next experiment involved setting up the microphone techniques one at a time and playing a short burst of sound from 4 different locations within the room. These signals were recorded into Pro-Tools and then later by zooming in and using the selector tool to measure the difference in samples between the two microphones within a pair the time difference was calculated. This gave some interesting results showing which techniques use time delays for localisation.

The combination of these two experiments have led me to choose a different room for my final recording, although I would like to use the SSL AWS 900 that comes with the room, it just isn't wide enough to get a large enough stereo field. I've spoken to some local string groups and it seems I will be creating my final recordings at some point in mid march.

My research is continuing, now moving forward to investigate the processes involved with reproducing stereo sound. Today I have been focusing on loudspeakers and the problems of acoustic crosstalk as well as reading a lot about transaural stereo- the process of recreating three dimensional virtual sound sources all around the listener using just two sound sources located infront of the listener. It's very clever but the research indicates it sounds quite unnatural to the listener and tends to cause fatigue pretty quickly. Tomorrow I will move onto investigating binaural and headphone stereo, I've already found some fascinating albums recreating Rachmaninov piano concertos recorded in both standard stereo and binaural and the differences between them are striking.

Spent 4 hours today in the university SSL studio beginning my initial experiments into the different stereo recording methods. I was met with a number of set backs including dilapidated stands which couldn't hold a microphone straight above the base, let alone at the extent of the boom making it very difficult to position the microphones close together without them drooping onto each other. Once they were finally cabled up we'd discover that half of the cables were faulty, the re-wiring requiring the mental agility usually associated with solving chinese puzzles to complete.

Finally signal was flowing all the way through to the AWS, but there it stopped, for some reason that neither I, nor Eddie could understand. Eventually we decided to bypass Pro-Tools and record in Logic instead.

By this point it was getting late in the day and patience was wearing thin, the realisation that these experiments would probably had to be repeated had sunk in however I was determined to get some useable results that at least proved the validity of the different methods. With the help of my friends Mike and Holly, I recorded samples of moving sound sources as well as simultaneous sources to demonstrate the improved intelligibility offered by stereo.

Listening back to the results confirms a few of the basic assumptions made by the research however it also demonstrated how the originally designed experiments were flawed, with the microphones shadowing each other and interfering with the stereo image. The next set of experiments will be conducted using the acoustic testing device CLIO and only one of the techniques setup at once to control the variables although the recording environment will inevitably compromise the results somewhat.

It's been a while since I've last posted, which isn't to say I haven't been doing work, I just had a lot of other deadlines just before Christmas pushing my dissertation onto the back burner. Now that 2011 is here I've spent the last week putting together my progress report detailing to my tutor exactly what progress I have made, where I'm behind and how my time plan is being adjusted to make up the difference.

Most of the research into microphone techniques is now complete, so I can now move onto researching some methods of reproducing stereo images- over headphones, speaker systems etc. and the processing that goes on to create a coherent image. I will also be investigating the artificial creation of stereo recordings through pan pots, delays and assorted plugins.

This Thursday afternoon will be the first of my experiments into the researched techniques. I will be setting up several techniques simultaneously and then recording sound sources at various points throughout the field, varying the angles of the microphones and the distance from them to gauge the effect this has on the image.The microphones and techniques I will be investigating are:

Not as much progress as I'd have liked due to impending deadlines from other modules and a massive amount of time currently being spent in the studio.

However I have managed to obtain a few more resources through the library which will help with my research into the microphone techniques and how humans localise sound. A Journal article from the AES which is available online and a copy of Spatial Hearing by Blauert.

The good news is that I have completed my placement module today which mean that next semester I will have only a single module and my dissertation to work on, So I will have plenty of time to do the experiments, research, final recording and analysis.

This week, continuing from looking at how humans localise sound, I have been introducing the basics of microphones looking at the moving coil vs capacitor microphones, polar patterns, sensitivity etc and how the right microphone selection is needed for creating a Stereo array.

Have been researching into the history of stereo a lot more thoroughly since handing in my project proposal. Been reading some very interesting books including Stereo Microphone Techniques & Spatial Audio which will come in handy. I also listened to a BBC Archive Hour program on Blumlein, the man who effectively invented stereo recording in the 1930s and it was fascinating, the man was literally a genius.

Today has involved me writing up my notes into the first section of the research looking at how humans localise sound. Basically it is the combined result of the different levels at each ear and the time delay between sound reaching each ear, obviously a little bit more complicated than that but it gives you the gist of it.

Had a meeting with my supervisor today as well which went well, just making sure that the direction of my research is correct and ensuring that I reference things correctly and often.

On the advice of my project tutor to keep a log of the progress I'm making on my project I have decided to keep a blog, this blog. I don't expect this to be of much interest to the rest of the world but you never know- If at the end anyone would like to see my dissertation I'll see about posting it perhaps.

Anyway, my dissertation is titled- 'An investigation into Stereo Microphone Techniques and their Applications' which is pretty self explanatory. During my placement at Modern World Studios different stereo techniques were often used especially for recording drums and strings. One day we setup 9 different stereo techniques at the same time to see how they each recorded the stereo field- this was really interesting but I didn't get enough time to follow it up with any real investigation, hence my dissertation and final year project.

The final recordings created as part of my final year project investigating stereo microphone techniques and their applications.

Five stereo arrays were selected to create the final small ensemble recordings, each producing satisfactory, yet varied results confirming the research suggestion that no one microphone technique will be suitable for every situation. The recordings were subject to a small scale listening test, which concluded that; for this ensemble and recording environment, the Blumlein array produced the most pleasing recording with a wide stereo spread stretching from ear to ear and providing accurate imagery for each of the 4 performers.